"Android 4.3 has a hidden feature! It's called 'App Ops' and it lets you selectively disable some permissions for your apps. Is some misbehaving app constantly pinging your location and draining your battery in a few hours? You can fix that now." Terrible name, fantastic feature. Also: finally.

Apps such as Permissions Denied, LBE Privacy Guard and PDroid, which restrict permissions of other apps, have been on Google Play for quite a long time now. The problem is that, as other people have noted, a lot of apps actually crash if you restrict their permissions because they assume they have been granted all of them in the first place.

I tried them out and it ends up being like a long drawn out UAT session where you try to work out the maximum number of permissions (and in what combination) can be withdrawn without crashing the app. It also shows how pretty well no error checking/trapping is being done by current apps w.r.t. permissions - hopefully this new feature might actually force them to write more robust code!

I suspect the chances are that most devs will just do a check that all permissions are available on startup and refuse to run if they aren't! If they do that, then they should at least bring a dialogue explaining why they need each of the permissions they haven't been granted.